Is happiness really a personal choice?

When little, you may have heard many people telling you that if you were good then good things would come to you, I remember hearing that once and since then, I started to count all my good deeds and waited for happiness to come.

After a while all I felt was deception, the math never really summed up and the more I tried, the less happy I felt.

Negativity started been part of me, saying things like: life is not fair, everyone just take advantage of me, happiness doesn’t exist, were part of my daily vocabulary; I became so frustrated that I decided to divorce God, positivism and joy and concentrate in taking control over my own fate.

Not much happened either since all I did was to become sarcastic and cold; I continued doing good deeds because it never felt right to do evil to others but all I could think about was that fairy tale stories and happy endings never really existed and that life was just a waste of time that we were forced to live.

Then a lot of things happened in my life, I got married, I became a mom, I got divorced, I got my heart broken few times and then one day I thought: “Why can’t I be happy?”

The term happiness became intriguing. What is happiness? How can I achieve that? Where do I find it? Is it in love? In my daughter? In my professional success?

It was then that I started a personal journey to try to answer those questions because if I was going to live this life and I had no other choice but to live it, then I would try to make the best of it.

We as humans have many survival mechanisms and they not only include the ones that help to keep our bodies alive, we also use many survival tools to keep our souls alive or at least very protected. One of these emotional survival tools is “to blame”, when we feel pain, we instantly try to find the source of it outside our own selves: They hurt me, I didn’t choose to come to this world and have this life, I gave it all and received nothing back and at the end, everyone is guilty but you!

We do that because it diminishes the pain, because if you don’t cause your own pain, then is not your fault and if is out of your control then it’s easier to just feel sorry for yourself and say: It is not in my hands to be happy! And that sense of helplessness gives you at least some type of momentary peace.

I read ones from a Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy source that "Just because people do not like adversity, they decide that it should not exist" and I thought: wow that is SO true!

Is easier to say: life is not fair! But, who told you that it should? And if it should, then it should be fair to whom? To you? Or to the rest of the world that might be causing your pain?

Fairness remains one of the most subjective subjects…

Did anyone tell you that you should expect fairness or rainbows everyday or that if you suffer a lot you were going to be rewarded with a great love life, awesome children and wealth?

Why life is unfair to you? Because if you ask that question then I would have to say that life is very unfair to everybody else in many ways, many times!

So nowadays I have decided to stop the blaming game, and concentrate on happiness.

Why I would be happy ONLY if I have everything I want or what I think I deserve, or if others make things that I like?

It would be a very hard journey if my happiness is based only on what others or life itself do for me so I thought, I guess in reality “happiness is in me” and if it is in me, then it is my decision to FEEL it.

Today, I decided that life is hard and that sometimes it takes forever for me to smile and at nights all I want to do is cry; other times I am scared, and lonely, and in despair, and I think about my sadness and I cry, and I think about the things in my life I would like to change and I cry a little more but at the end of that shower of emotions, I AM HAPPY because I learn every day, because I am able to understand my feelings and because in reality happiness is my personal choice!

#choices #REBT #happpiness #Choices